As the movie begins, we're introduced to Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) as she hitchhikes to Las Vegas with dreams of joining a chorus line. But her arrival in Sin City isn't a pleasant one, as her ride promptly drives off with her luggage and money as soon as he drops her off. But her bad luck is counterbalanced by some good luck as well. Nomi almost immediately strikes up a friendship with Molly Abrams (Gina Ravera), a local seamstress who takes her in as a roommate.
Now with a roof over her head, it isn't long before she ends up getting work as a stripper at Cheetah's Topless Club. It is at Cheetah's where she catches the eye of Zack Carey (Kyle MacLachlan), the entertainment director at the Stardust Casino. As Nomi's prospects quickly rise, she also develops a rival in Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon), Zack's girlfriend and the star of the Stardust's cabaret show. And from there, we get general bitchiness, backbiting, and catfighting as Nomi claws and scratches her way to the top.
I won't lie to you; I feel dirty even thinking about Showgirls. It isn't sexy, it isn't erotic, it isn't titillating, and it isn't pleasant to look at or listen to. It's just a waste. I'm not only embarrassed to admit I've actually seen Showgirls, but I'm also embarrassed for everyone involved with its production. I'm certain they didn't go in expecting the movie to suck, but for it to have ended up as a miserable failure and the butt of so many jokes in 1995... damn.
But where did it all go wrong? It's a combination of things. Part of it is due to the direction, courtesy of Paul Verhoeven. His work here is unimpressive to say the least, which is a real shame considering that his prior résumé includes awesome movies like Total Recall and RoboCop. It's like if Martin Scorcese decided he wanted his next movie to be a shot-for-shot remake of Manos: The Hands of Fate.
The real problem is that the movie is just plain ugly. There are a few rare instances of some nice cinematography, but watching the movie is the cinematic equivalent of staring at the floor of a filthy truck stop men's room for two hours. For all the flashing neon lights and all the naked women and all the sex, Showgirls is not very pleasant to look at. You'd think a movie that's supposed to be sexy might try to be, but Verhoeven manages to completely drop the ball.
It doesn't help him that he was working from a rather pathetic script too. Written by Joe Eszterhas, who previously teamed with Verhoeven to create Basic Instinct three years earlier, the script is lousy from beginning to end. Its attempts at being edgy and scandalous are just laughable, like a little kid doing a bad job pretending he's a tough grownup.
Everything Eszterhas has written is just ghastly. The characters are irritating, the dialogue is banal, and the story itself is beyond pitiful. If it can be done badly, Eszterhas is all over it. The worst thing about the script, though, is its characters. With Showgirls, Eszterhas has created some of the most repellant, unlikable characters that I have ever seen in any movie ever. You will find yourself hating just about every character in this piece of crap. That's not an exaggeration.
To summarize, Nomi is a psycho that will throw a temper tantrum at the drop of a hat, Zack is a sleazy douchebag who trades sex for success, and Cristal is the Ice Queen from Planet Catfight. I've seen movies where the main characters are rapists, killers, and psychopaths, but I could still get invested in them. Movies like The Devil's Rejects and American Psycho proved that it's possible to do so, but somewhere Showgirls missed the boat. A writer with the tiniest sliver of talent could have made these characters intriguing or remotely interesting. Eszterhas can't even do that, and we end up with characters that are so repulsive that it'll take you right out of the movie.
It even spreads to the supporting characters, who are as equally unlikable. You do get a small glimmer of hope with Glenn Plummer's character, who is one of the rare characters who isn't out to get Nomi and is actually friendly. But then you find out that what he really wanted was to get in Nomi's pants. So yeah.
That leaves us with just one character who is a genuinely nice person from start to finish, that being Molly. She's the only character who doesn't do anything bad to anyone else, and is a generally pleasant character altogether. So you know what that means, right? Eszterhas has to have something bad happen to her. And I mean really bad. I usually try to avoid spoilers if I can help it, but since most of the reviews I've read online have mentioned it, I'm just going to come out and say it: Molly gets violently gang raped.
The scene is set when Nomi pulls a few strings and gets Molly invited to a party that her favorite singer is attending. She ends up setting Molly and the singer up, only for the singer and two of his buddies to beat the crap out of her and violate her. The rape comes late in the movie, sending it spiraling downward from dumb campy fun into pure irredeemable garbage. Did it serve any purpose? No, unless the purpose was to make Showgirls something I never want to watch again. It marks an unnecessary shift in tone that only makes things even worse.
And somehow Showgirls keeps finding ways to suck harder, because the cast is absurdly atrocious. The worst offender is the movie's leading lady, Elizabeth Berkley, who was expecting Showgirls to be her big breakout role following her job on Saved by the Bell. Instead, it ended up killing her career. And thank God for small miracles, because Berkley is a terrible actress. She is so unbelievably awful that she makes you want to jump into the movie and hit her.
The role of Nomi is written as a conceited toddler that is stuck in the body of a adult, and Berkley plays her with such frustrating earnestness that I absolutely hated her. There's no middle ground with her, either. At one point, she can be as happy as a clam, then snap! A switch flips and she's so angry that she vomits all over herself before running out into traffic. And then, just as quickly, she's giving some stranger a hug. I don't know how much of it was Eszterhas and how much was Berkley, but Nomi's bipolar madness can and will leave an unsuspecting viewer screaming with rage.
Berkley's acting style seems to alternate between maddening, laughable, and creepy. I say "creepy" because I don't think she blinks once during the entire movie. I don't know why that bugs me so much, but it's like I was hoping she'd blink to prove she was real and not some robot built to be naked and act badly. And I have to tell you that it's actually really hard to tell the maddening and laughable parts apart, because they often overlap. You might find yourself laughing at Berkley's performance and yelling profanities at the same time.
If anything, I can tell you which part I thought was the funniest: the swimming pool sex scene. If you ever needed an example of "so bad, it's funny," it's this. Nomi and Zack hop into his pool for a little romantic interlude, and at one point, Berkley starts flopping around like somebody threw a toaster into the pool with them. I'd have actually felt kinda bad for her if I wasn't laughing so hard. The funniest thing about it is that somebody watched the dailies of that scene during production and thought, "Yeah, that's good! Let's leave it in the movie!"
But here I've spent so much time making fun of Berkley's awful acting that I've completely forgotten about the supporting cast. None of them are as bad as Berkley, but that isn't enough to earn them a reprieve. So let's start making fun of them instead, okay?
Let's begin with Kyle MacLachlan, who I'm disappointed to see in this movie. The guy isn't a bad actor at all, but it seems like he just started doing nothing but bad movies after Twin Peaks got cancelled. What's so sad about it is that Showgirls is so bad that it brings him down with it, resulting in a performance that's embarrassing to watch. MacLachlan is so stiff that it makes me wonder what his thought process was during filming. Maybe it was something like, "Oh no, I'm stuck in this horrible movie and I can't get out! Maybe if I half-ass it, they'll fire me. That'll totally work, won't it?" Sorry, Kyle, it didn't work. It would have been great if it had, though.
In the role of Nomi's rival is Gina Gershon, who plays the role as if she were the cattiest bitch you've ever seen in your life. Gershon is almost fun in the role because of how hammy she is at times, but then you remember poorly the character is written and you start turning against her. It's weird.
I also got the impression that Gershon didn't really want to know what she wanted to do with the character. The reason I say this is because Gershon suddenly takes on a Southern accent about halfway through the movie. Why? Beats me. There's a throwaway line at one point where the character mentions she's from Texas, but the fact that Gershon picks up her accent out of nowhere is still confusing. Maybe she came up with a reason for it during production, like Matthew Goode's in-and-out German accent in Watchmen, I don't know. It's easier for me to simply believe it's a mistake on her part.
The rest of the cast is forgettable. At least I'd like to forget about them, that is. None of them have any sort of substantial bearing on what little plot there actually is. The actors who aren't bad are simply going through the motions. And if they can't be bothered to care, then neither can I.
It's amazing just how pitiful Showgirls is. The direction is lazy at best, the writing is idiotic, the actors are irritating, and the dancing — which is second only to all the nudity as the movie's biggest focus — features some really lousy choreography. Showgirls is the complete opposite of what it was intended to be, which results in a movie that is practically unbearable to watch. How it became a cult classic, I have no idea. I'm having a hard time believing anyone would want to watch Showgirls, even to make fun of it. It's that bad. If you do choose to the movie, be forewarned that you'll end up hating yourself afterwards.
Final Rating: *
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